{"id":110845,"date":"2017-05-12T15:10:18","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T19:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110845"},"modified":"2017-05-12T16:36:51","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T20:36:51","slug":"the-kaleidoscopic-flicker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/12\/the-kaleidoscopic-flicker\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kaleidoscopic Flicker"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Jean Stein\u2019s greatest legacy, the narrative oral history.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From the first-edition jacket of Edie<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Edie Sedgwick was home for the holidays in California, behind the wheel of a fast car, when she barreled through a flashing red light on New Year\u2019s Eve, 1964. G. J. Barker-Benfield, a friend, was sitting in the passenger seat; his head went through the windshield. He remembers the dumbfounded TV reports of the wreck that totaled Edie\u2019s car: \u201cHow did two people step out of this car alive?\u201d Others weren\u2019t so lucky. Eerily, Edie\u2019s brother Bobby had crashed his motorcycle around the same time that night, and he died twelve days later. Barker-Benfield had to get twenty-two stitches, while Edie emerged from the crash with only a broken knee.<\/p>\n

Not long afterward, Geoffrey Gates ran into Edie at the former midtown Manhattan nightclub Ondine. It was early January. Edie flitted through the party, doing the twist and wearing a cast stretching from her hip to her toe. \u201cThe smile was wild \u2026 manic,\u201d Gates remembered. \u201cShe kept getting up and dancing; one leg sheer white with only a couple of signatures on it just rooted to one spot on the floor, and the rest of her body spinning around the cast as if she were an acrobat. She still had a girl\u2019s finishing-school appearance, but her face and actions showed that something else was coming up very fast.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

We have the late Jean Stein, the brilliant author and a former editor of this magazine, to thank for these vivid remembrances, which feel more cinematic than historical. With George Plimpton, Stein, who passed away earlier this month, compiled the definitive story of Sedgwick\u2019s life, the riveting Edie: An American Biography<\/a><\/em> (1982). Woven together from interviews and firsthand accounts of the people who were there, the book, in its depth and nuance, expanded the scope of the oral history as a form. Edie<\/em> spans Sedgwick\u2019s blue-blood East Coast lineage, her fraught childhood in California, the days she spent semi-sculpting an enormous horse at Harvard, her time in and out of hospitals, her stint as a Vogue<\/em> \u201cyouthquaker\u201d in New York, and her brief marriage before she died in 1971. Edie<\/em> is also about a family who kept its secrets close even unto death. (At the family plot, the \u201cSedgwick Pie,\u201d all the gravestones turn inward toward one another, so that when the Sedgwicks arise on Judgment Day, \u201cthey will have to see no one but Sedgwicks.\u201d) Further still, it\u2019s a critical document of a nation in flux\u2014of the burgeoning youth movement that insisted on discarding the values of the previous generation, and of the unexpected costs that came with this lifestyle.<\/p>\n

Edie<\/em>\u2019s strength is the result of Stein\u2019s shrewd reporting and arranging. Even compared to other oral histories, its presentation is unadorned. There\u2019s no narrator leading the reader toward certain conclusions, no bracketed quotes, no unnecessary explanations. Instead, the voices of those who crossed paths with Edie, from Truman Capote to Diana Vreeland to the bikers she hung out with for a spell in California (because, as one T Talley put it, she \u201csaw it as a great new world to enter into\u201d) form a chorus that speaks with often disturbing clarity.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Stein\u2019s seismic approach to the oral history influenced a generation of authors. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, who wrote the landmark oral history of punk rock, Please Kill Me<\/em><\/a>, told me that Stein\u2019s work had galvanized them. \u201cI think Norman [Mailer] was the one who was like, You gotta read this, Legs.\u00a0And I was like, Yeah, yeah, right,\u201d McNeil said. \u201cProbably picked it up when I was hungover and read it in like a day. I was just like, Whoa! Just gobbled it up, gorged myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCain, who was a teenager then, said that Edie <\/em>piqued her interest after she saw a review of it in the Sunday New York Times <\/em>that her parents had brought back from a trip to the city. \u201cI actually ordered it from the local library, and I got it and just couldn\u2019t put it down. And it just opened up so many vistas for me.\u201d She sought out other oral histories, like Studs Terkel\u2019s Working<\/em>, and began to think about what other stories could be told using the format. \u201cI think in maybe fifty years or so that a lot of nonfiction books will be told using the oral history format on almost any subject,\u201d McNeil said. \u201cLike the investigation of Trump and Russia\u2014I think that would make a great oral history. Or Oppenheimer working at Los Alamos.\u201d<\/p>\n

McNeil, a \u201cformer resident punk at Punk Magazine,<\/em>\u201d had lived through the movement and knew many of the personalities central to punk\u2019s story\u2014an advantage when he and McCain started work on Please Kill Me<\/em>. But reading Edie<\/em> had taught them that the stars didn\u2019t have the real stories\u2014the bit players did. \u201cThat, we found, was really, really kind of the key to the whole thing,\u201d McNeil said. \u201cBesides having Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry talking, you get the waitresses, soundmen, and all the incidental people who are not really incidental when you\u2019re in the scene \u2026 And they always have the best stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, they learned that Stein had written, in the introduction to her 1970 book American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy<\/em>, a kind of manifesto about her technique. <\/em>Outlining the challenges of the form, she distinguishes between the oral history, which has traditionally involved gathering interview transcripts, and the \u201coral narrative\u201d process she developed for Journey<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In an oral narrative, she writes, the author attempts \u201cto subject oral history to the narrative process\u201d; the narrative itself is in the hands of the interviewees, who shape it as they choose what to disclose. \u201cOral history has been largely thought of as the collecting of interview transcripts for storage in archives in order to provide historians with research material,\u201d she writes. \u201cSomewhat less common is the use of interview transcripts as a literary form, in which the raw transcripts are edited, arranged, and allowed to stand for themselves, without the intervention by the historian.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say the author isn\u2019t a part of the process\u2014some subjects in Edie<\/em>, for instance, broke the fourth wall and addressed Stein directly, providing a rare glimpse at her side of the conversation. (\u201cYou asked me if we need more than one Warhol in this century,\u201d Jasper Johns says in one of his statements.) And, of course, Stein herself appears as an interview subject in several of her books, especially her last, West of Eden<\/em>, which devotes a chapter to her family.<\/p>\n

The success of these books lies in Stein\u2019s interviewing prowess\u2014she relies not so much on a spitfire question-and-answer volley but rather careful nudging. Danny Fields, a former record-company executive and editor who was interviewed for both Edie <\/em>and Please Kill Me<\/em>, recently told Gillian McCain about his exchanges with Stein. \u201cHe said, I went to her apartment and it was like, \u2018Do you want some champagne? Do you want some duck?\u2019 and we just sat down and I just spilled,\u201d McCain says. \u201cHe didn\u2019t say spilled<\/em>, but he said she was quite shy. And then he played me some of his interview, because she had given him some of the tape. And she did: she spoke very quietly. Just the part he played for me, it was just five minutes. It seems like she was prodding him, not actually asking questions. And that\u2019s what Legs and I do. We might start with a question but it becomes prodding. We like our interviews to be really conversational.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, sculpting a cogent narrative from a host of conversations is bound to lead to some discrepancies\u2014but Stein welcomed these. To her mind, contradiction was central to the narrative oral history. Her essay includes a disclaimer that some testimonials will not make sense from an editorial standpoint, but that it\u2019s crucial to leave these remarks the way they are. Contrary or even incorrect versions of the same event appear in Edie\u2014<\/em>the uncertainty makes Stein\u2019s work idiosyncratic and alive, unlike preened, supposedly \u201cdefinitive\u201d oral histories, which sharpen their interviews in pursuit of an elusive perfection. People are unreliable narrators by nature; by displaying these accounts side by side, Stein trusted readers to draw their own conclusions. \u201cThe concept of American Journey<\/em> was not to give a solid historical representation of an era,\u201d she writes. \u201cThe technique used is occasionally almost the kaleidoscopic \u2018flicker\u2019 technique of films, in which a series of quick images of considerable variety provides an effect of wholeness.\u201d<\/p>\n

As anyone who\u2019s read Stein\u2019s books knows, her approach encourages her subjects to air their grievances; as people opened up to her, they revealed stories of turbulence and violence, plus the tensions of classism, sexism, racism, and ageism. McNeil and McCain, who are currently working on an oral history of 1969, have noticed this in their interviews, too, and it may be Stein\u2019s most remarkable legacy: the creation of a form that championed a mosaiclike reality, where every person\u2019s account carries an equal weight as \u201ctruth.\u201d Her \u201coral narrative\u201d carves out a place where history is illuminated by people who had a hand in shaping it, yet had never been so much asked for their opinions, and are held up as sacred as the deeds that line history textbooks. \u201cYou can really document injustice and the way things went down so well,\u201d McNeil notes. \u201cI think Jean Stein deserves a medal for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paula Mejia writes about arts and culture for\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times,<\/em> NPR,<\/em> Rolling Stone,<\/em> Vulture, and others. Her first book, a 33 1\/3 series volume on the Jesus and Mary Chain\u2019s<\/em> Psychocandy, <\/em>was released in October 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The late author of \u201cEdie\u201d and \u201cWest of Eden\u201d pioneered an approach she called \u201coral narrative,\u201d\u00a0expanding the scope and depth of the form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[28810,28809,11433,14,23412,1132,21429,23411,9459,28811,23408,7036,10438,18938,21430],"class_list":["post-110845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-american-journey","tag-edie","tag-edie-sedgwick","tag-george-plimpton","tag-gillian-mccain","tag-interviews","tag-jean-stein","tag-legs-mcneil","tag-oral-history","tag-oral-narrative","tag-please-kill-me","tag-robert-kennedy","tag-storytelling","tag-studs-turkel","tag-west-of-eden"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Jean Stein Reinvented the Oral History<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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